The Foreign Correspondent

by Alan Furst

  “Very good,” she answered, her blue behind wobbling as she plodded away.

  “What is she, Greek, you think?” Kolb said.

  “Somewhere down there,” Weisz said. “Maybe Turkish.”

  “Want to try another place?”

  “Do you?” Weisz said to Ferrara.

  “Oh, let’s have this bottle, then we’ll like it better.”

  They had to work at it, the champagne was dreadful, and barely cool, but did in time elevate their spirits, and kept Weisz from falling dead asleep with his head on the table. Momo Tsipler sang a Viennese love song, and that got Kolb talking about Vienna, in the old days, before the Anschluss—the tiny Dollfuss, not five feet tall, the chancellor of Austria until the Nazis killed him in 1934—and the infinitely bizarre personality—high culture, low lovelife—of that city. “All those high-breasted fraus in the pastry shops, noses in the air, proper as the day is long, well, I knew a fellow called Wolfi, a salesman of ladies’ undergarments, and he once told me…”

  Ferrara excused himself and disappeared into the crowd. Kolb went on with his story, for a time, then wound down to silence when the colonel emerged with a dancing partner. Kolb watched them for a moment, then said, “Say this for him, he certainly picked the best.”

  She was. Brassy blond hair in a French roll, a sulky face accented by a heavy lower lip, and a body both lithe and fulsome, which she clearly liked to show off, all of it alive and animated as she danced. The two of them made, in fact, an attractive couple. Momo Tsipler, his fingers walking up and down the keyboard, swiveled around on his piano stool for a better view, then gave them a grand Viennese wink, somewhere well beyond lewd.

  “There is something I want to ask you,” Weisz said.

  Kolb wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to be asked—he’d perfectly heard a certain note in Weisz’s voice, he’d heard it before, and always it preceded inquiries that touched on his vocation. “Oh? And what is that?”

  Weisz laid out a condensed version of the OVRA attack on the Liberazione committee. Bottini’s murder, the interrogation of Véronique, Salamone’s lost job, his own experience on the place Concorde.

  Kolb knew exactly what he was talking about. “What is it you want?” he said.

  “Can you help us?”

  “Not me,” Kolb said. “I don’t make decisions like that, you’d have to ask Mr. Brown, and he’d have to ask someone else, and the final answer would be, I expect, no.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “Pretty much, I am. Our business is always quiet, to do what has to be done, then fade into the night. We aren’t in Paris to pick a fight with another service. That’s bad form, Weisz, that’s not the way this work is done.”

  “But you oppose Mussolini. Certainly the British government does.”

  “What gave you that idea?”

  “You’re having an antifascist book written, creating an opposition hero, and that’s not fading into the night.”

  Kolb was amused. “Written, yes. Published, we’ll see. I have no special information, but I would bet you ten francs that the diplomats are hard at it to bring Mussolini over to our side, just like last time, just like 1915. If that doesn’t work, then, maybe, we’ll attack him, and it will be time for the book to appear.”

  “Still, no matter what happens politically, you’ll want the support of the émigrés.”

  “It’s always nice to have friends, but they’re not the crucial element, by far, not. We’re a traditional service, and we operate on the classic assumptions. Which means we concentrate on the three C’s: Crown, Capital, and Clergy. That’s where the influence is, that’s how a state changes sides, when the leader, king, premier, whatever he calls himself, and the big money—captains of industry—and the religious leaders, whatever God they pray to, when these people want a new policy, then things change. So, émigrés can help, but they’re famously a pain in the ass, every day some new problem. Forgive me, Weisz, for being frank with you, but it’s the same with journalists—journalists work for other people, for Capital, and that’s who gets to tell them what to write. Nations are run by oligarchies, by whoever’s powerful, and that’s where any service will commit its resources, and that’s what we’re doing in Italy.”

  Weisz wasn’t so very good at hiding his reactions, Kolb could see what he felt. “I’m telling you something you don’t know?”

  “No, you aren’t, it all makes sense. But we don’t know where to turn, and we’re going to lose the newspaper.”

  The music stopped, it was time for the Wienerwald Companions to take a break—the drummer wiped his face with a handkerchief, the violinist lit a fresh cigarette. Ferrara and his partner walked over to the bar and waited to be served.

  “Look,” Kolb said. “You’re working hard for us, never mind the money, and Brown appreciates what you’re doing, that’s why you’re being treated to a big night. Of course, this doesn’t mean he’ll get us into a war with the Italians, but—by the way, we never had this conversation—but, maybe, if you come up with something in return, we might talk to somebody in one of the French services.”

  Ferrara and his new friend came over to the table, champagne cocktails in hand. Weisz stood up to offer her his chair, but she waved him off and settled on Ferrara’s lap. “Hello everybody,” she said. “I am Irina.” She had a heavy Russian accent.

  After that, she ignored them, moving around on Ferrara’s lap, toying with his hair, giggling and carrying on, whispering answers to whatever he was saying in her ear. Finally, he said to Kolb, “Don’t bother looking for me when you go back to the hotel.” Then, to Weisz: “And I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

  “We can take you wherever you’re going, in the taxi,” Kolb said.

  Ferrara smiled. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll find my way home.”

  A few minutes later, they left, Irina clinging to his arm. Kolb said good night, then gave them a few minutes, enough for her to get dressed. He looked at his watch as he stood up to leave. “Some nights…” he said with a sigh, and left it at that. Weisz could see he wasn’t pleased—now he would have to spend hours, likely till dawn, sitting in the back of the taxi and watching some doorway, God only knew where.

  11 May. Salamone called an editorial committee meeting for midday. As Weisz arrived, hurrying up the street, he saw Salamone and a few other giellisti standing silent in front of the Café Europa. Why? Was it locked? When Weisz joined them, he saw why. The entry to the café was blocked by a few scrap boards nailed across the door. Inside, shelves of broken bottles rose above the bar, in front of a charred wall. The ceiling was black, as were the tables and chairs, tumbled this way and that on the tile floor, amid puddles of black water. The bitter smell of dead fire, of burnt plaster and paint, hung in the air on the street.

  Salamone didn’t comment, his face said it all. From the others, hands in pockets, a subdued greeting. Finally, Salamone said, “I guess we’ll have to meet somewhere else,” but his voice was low and defeated.

  “Maybe the station buffet, at the Gare du Nord,” the benefactor said.

  “Good idea,” Weisz said. “It’s just a few minutes’ walk.”

  They headed for the railway station, and entered the crowded buffet. The waiter was helpful, found them a table for five, but there were people all around them, who glanced over as the forlorn little group settled themselves and ordered coffees. “Not an easy place to talk,” Salamone said. “But then, I don’t think we have much to say.”

  “Are you sure, Arturo?” the professor from Siena said. “I mean, it’s a shock, to see something like that. No accident, I think.”

  “No, not an accident,” Elena said.

  “It’s maybe not the moment to make decisions,” the benefactor said. “Why not wait a day or two, then we’ll see how we feel.”

  “I’d like to agree,” Salamone said. “But this has gone on long enough.”

  “Where is everybody?” Elena said.

  “That’s the prob
lem, Elena,” Salamone said. “I spoke to the lawyer yesterday. He didn’t resign, officially, but when I telephoned, he told me his apartment had been robbed. A terrible mess, he said. They’d spent all night trying to clean it up, everything thrown on the floor, broken glasses and dishes.”

  “Did he call the police?” the Sienese professor said.

  “Yes, he did. They said such things happened all the time. Asked for a list of stolen items.”

  “And our friend from Venice?”

  “Don’t know,” Salamone said. “He said he would be here, but he hasn’t shown up, so now it’s just the five of us.”

  “That’s enough,” Elena said.

  “I think we have to postpone the next issue,” Weisz said, to spare Salamone from saying it.

  “And give them what they want,” Elena said.

  “Well,” Salamone said, “we can’t go on until we can find a way to fight back, and nobody’s come up with a way to do that. Suppose some detective from the Préfecture agreed to take the case, what then? Assign twenty men to watch all of us? Day and night? Until they caught somebody? This is never going to happen, and the OVRA perfectly well know it won’t.”

  “So,” the Sienese professor said, “it’s finished?”

  “Postponed,” Salamone said. “Which is perhaps a nice word for finished. I suggest we skip a month, wait until June, then we’ll meet once more. Elena, do you agree?”

  She shrugged, unwilling to say the words.

  “Sergio?”

  “Agreed,” the benefactor said.

  “Zerba?”

  “I’ll go along with the committee,” the Sienese professor said.

  “And Carlo.”

  “Wait until June,” Weisz said.

  “Very well. It’s unanimous.”

  Agent 207 was precise, in a report to the OVRA delivered in Paris the following day, on the decision and the vote of the committee. Which meant, once the report reached the Pubblica Sicurezza committee in Rome, that their operation was not yet complete. Their objective was to finish Liberazione—not postpone its publication—and make an example, to let the others, Communist, socialist, Catholic, see what happened to those who dared to oppose fascism. Then, too, they were great believers in the seventeenth-century English adage, coined in civil war, which said, “He that draws his sword against his prince must throw away the scabbard.” Thus inspired, they determined that the Paris operation, as planned, with dates and targets and various actions, would continue.

  The conductor on the 7:15 Paris/Genoa Express was approached on the fourteenth of May. After the train left the station at Lyons, the passengers slept, or read, or watched the springtime fields passing by the windows, and the conductor headed for the baggage car. There he found two friends: a dining-car waiter, and a sleeping-car porter, playing two-handed scopa, using a steamer trunk turned on its side for a card table. “Care to join us?” the waiter said. The conductor agreed, and was dealt a hand.

  They played for a time, gossiping and joking, then the sound of the train, the beat of the engine and the wheels on the track, rose sharply as the door at the end of the car was opened. They looked up, to see a uniformed inspector of the Milizia Ferroviaria, the railway police, called Gennaro, who they’d known for years.

  The railway police were Mussolini’s way of enforcing his most noted achievement, making the trains run on time. This was the result of a determined effort in the early 1920s, after a train headed for Turin arrived four hundred hours behind schedule, much too late. But that was long ago, when Italy seemed to be following Russia into Bolshevism, and the trains often stopped, for long periods, so the trainworkers could participate in political meetings. Those days were over, but the Milizia Ferroviaria still rode the trains, now investigating crimes against the regime.

  “Gennaro, come and play scopa,” the waiter said, and the inspector pulled a suitcase up to the steamer trunk.

  Fresh cards were dealt and they started a new game. “Tell me,” Gennaro said to the conductor, “you ever see anybody on this train with one of those secret newspapers?”

  “Secret newspapers?”

  “Oh come on, you know what I mean.”

  “On this train? You mean a passenger, reading it?”

  “No. Somebody taking them down to Genoa. Bundled up, maybe.”

  “Not me. Did you ever see that?” he asked the waiter.

  “No. I never did.”

  “What about you?” he asked the porter.

  “No, not me either. Of course, if it’s the Communists, you’d never know about it, they’d have some secret way of doing it.”

  “That’s true,” the conductor said. “Maybe you should look for the Communists.”

  “Are they on this train?”

  “This train? Oh no, we wouldn’t have that. I mean, you can’t talk to those guys.”

  “So, you think it’s the Communists,” Gennaro said.

  The waiter played a three of cups, from the forty-card Italian deck, the conductor answered with a six of coins, and the porter said, “Hah!”

  Gennaro stared at his cards for a moment, then said, “But it’s not a Communist paper. That’s what they tell me.”

  “Who then?”

  “The GL, they say, it’s their paper.” Cautiously, he laid down a six of cups.

  “Sure you want to do that?” the waiter said.

  Gennaro nodded. The waiter took the trick with a ten of swords.

  “Who knows,” the conductor said, “they’re all the same to me, those political types. All they do is argue, they don’t like this, they don’t like that. Va Napoli, is what I say to them.” Go to Naples, which meant fuck you.

  The waiter dealt the cards for the next hand. “Maybe it’s in the baggage,” the waiter said. “We could be playing on it right now.”

  Gennaro looked around, at trunks and suitcases piled everywhere. “They search that at the border,” he said.

  “True,” the conductor said. “That’s not your job. They can’t expect you to do everything.”

  “Bundle of newspapers,” the porter said. “Tied up with a string, you mean. We’d be sure to see something like that.”

  “And you never did, right, you’re sure?”

  “Seen a lot of things on this train, but never that.”

  “What about you?” Gennaro said to the conductor.

  “I don’t remember seeing it. A pig in a crate, once. Remember that?”

  The waiter laughed, pinched his nose with his thumb and forefinger, and said, “Phew.”

  “And we get a body, sometimes, in a coffin,” the conductor said. “Maybe you should look in there.”

  “Maybe he’d be reading the paper, Gennaro,” the waiter said. “Then you’d get a medal.”

  They all laughed, and went back to playing cards.

  On the nineteenth of May, a tipster in Berlin, a telephone operator at the Hotel Kaiserhof, told Eric Wolf of the Reuters bureau that arrangements were under way for Count Ciano, the Italian foreign minister, to visit Berlin. Rooms had been booked for visiting officials, and feature writers from the Stefani agency, the Italian wire service. A travel agent in Rome, waiting to talk to a reservations clerk, had told the operator what was going on.

  At eleven in the morning, Delahanty called Weisz into his office. “What are you working on?” he said.

  “Bobo, the talking dog up in Saint-Denis. I just got back.”

  “Does it talk?”

  “It says”—Weisz deepened his voice to a low growl and barked—“‘bonjour,’ and ‘ça va.’”

  “Really?”

  “Sort of, if you listen hard. The owner used to be in the circus. It’s a cute dog, a little mongrel, scruffy, it’ll make a good photo.”

  Delahanty shook his head in mock despair. “There may well be more important news. Eric Wolf has cabled London, and they telephoned us—Ciano is going to Berlin, with a grand entourage, and the Stefani agency will be there in force. An official visit, not just consulta
tions, and, according to what we hear, a major event, a treaty, called ‘the Pact of Steel.’”

  After a moment, Weisz said, “So that’s that.”

  “Yes, it looks like the talking’s done. Mussolini is going to sign up with Hitler.” The war on the horizon, as Weisz sat in the grimy office, had moved a step closer. “You’ll have to go home and pack, then get out to Le Bourget, we’re flying you over. The ticket’s on the way to your hotel, by messenger. A one-thirty flight.”

  “Forget Bobo?”

  Delahanty looked harassed. “No, leave the bloody dog to Woodley, he can use your notes. What London wants from you is the Italian view, the opposition view. In other words, give ’em hell, if it’s what we think it is, both barrels and the cat’s breakfast. This is bad news, for Britain, and for every subscriber we have, and that’s the way you’ll write it.”

  On his way to the Métro, Weisz stopped at the American Express office and wired a message to Christa at her office in Berlin. MUST LEAVE PARIS TODAY FORWARD MAIL AUNT MAGDA EXPECT TO SEE HER TONIGHT HANS. Magda was one of the whippets, Christa would know what he meant.

  Weisz reached the Dauphine twenty minutes later, and checked at the desk, but his ticket had not yet arrived. He was very excited as he ran up the stairs, and his mind, caught in crosscurrents, sped from one thing to the next. He realized that Kolb had indulged, at the nightclub, in the sin of optimism—the British diplomats had failed, and had lost Mussolini as an ally. This was, to Weisz, pure heartache, his country was in real trouble now and it would suffer, would, if events played out as he believed, be made to fight a war, a war that would end badly. Yet, strange how life went, the coming political explosion meant that Liberazione, his war, might possibly be salvaged. A visit to Pompon and the Sûreté machine would be put in gear, because an Italian operation, soon an enemy operation, would be seen in a very different light, and what happened next would be far beyond the efforts of some yawning detective at the Préfecture.

  But it also meant, to Weisz, a great deal more than that. As he climbed, affairs of state drifted away like smoke, replaced by visions of what would happen when Christa came to his room. His imagination was on fire, first this, then that. No, the other way. It was cruel to be happy that morning, but he had no choice. For if the world insisted on going to hell, no matter what he, what anyone, tried to do, he and Christa would, by evening light, steal a few hours of life in a private world. Last chance, perhaps, because that other world would soon enough come looking for them, and Weisz knew it.